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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1553 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 12, 2026

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Anyone know of post-apoc fiction that features storage units?

It feels like half the new construction in my town consists of these stupid, chunky self-storage buildings. Incredibly cheap materials. Similar but not identical layouts. They are fundamentally dead buildings, existing to facilitate brief visits and long periods of quiescence. Mausoleums for consumer goods.

This brought to mind the sci-fi tropes of “tech-mining,” delving the ruins of the past for lost and valuable resources. It’s a big part of certain genres of post-collapse sci-fi. Starsector (probably by way of Revelation Space), Hyperion Cantos, Battletech, arguably Foundation. I most recently saw a version in Iain Banks’ Matter, where an eroding waterfall progressively excavates the long-lost city buried beneath its cliff. The advanced alloys which withstood all that water are salvaged for building materials by a subsequent civilization. Evocative.

These tropes surely owe a lot to the post-apocalyptic genre. A Canticle for Liebowitz begins with a monk uncovering relics in a lost fallout shelter. Not anything useful, mind you, but cultural artifacts of immeasurable value. An apocalypse is perhaps the easiest explanation for how the ancients had something we can no longer get for ourselves.

There’s a game called Caves of Qud dotted with ruins from a long-dead civilization:

Here crumble the mysterious Eaters' vine-swathed works, spun on the cyclopean lathe in an ageless past. Chrome steeples and parapets that rise above the clutches of shale hint at the labyrinths beneath them.

You can trudge through a futuristic jungle only to stumble upon these bones of the former world, populated by tribal robots and sentry turrets. Descend into the caves like a true arconaut, and you’ll find even greater treasure…

In our current reality, how much of that “treasure” is piled in storage units? Boring-ass grids of concrete with one, maybe two garage doors between the loot and the outside world. If the bombs dropped today, any future generations would face the most boring, practical version of tech-mining: cleaning out the attic. “Yeah, we cleared out the mutants from sector 35. Found another one of those metal crypts. Bring the boys over; we can probably find each of them a golf club.”

Years ago, a storage unit executive compared his business to WMI (a massive trash company) saying we run dumps that people pay us 100s of a month to use). I had never really thought of it that way before, but I never thought of them the same way again, either.

Incredibly cheap materials.

Fun fact: The live load for which storage buildings are designed is 125 lb/ft2—three times as high as the 40 lb/ft2 of a residential living room. So these storage buildings do at least have some hefty foundations (and walls, for the multi-story ones).

Star Citizen's 'end-game' revolves around a lot of this stuff, just with slightly different names:

  • Executive Hangars, in the pirate system Pyro, store keycard-locked and suped-up versions of spaceships, left over from when the mining company Pyrotechnic Amalgamated went bankrupt and abandoned the system. Get a lot of PvP attention (when they work).
  • Contested Zone Vaults, also in Pyro, are just where pirates store valuable guns and ship parts when they're busy worshiping/getting radiation burns from the star.
  • Caches in Nyx, which are ship parts implied to a mix of smuggled goods from resistance cells back when the human empire was overtly evil, and some weapons caches from the same era's cold war against some turtle-like aliens.

(though the Oynx facilities and Lazarus facilities, as quasi-active research labs, don't quite fit.)

SC's in a fuzzy zone about whether it's post-apocalyptic. The post-Messr human empire is supposed to be in the middle of a Rome/Byzantium split, so it's kinda the aftermath of a collapse culturally? But there hasn't really been a decrease in technological development (and several major advances), so much as a lot of previously-restricted military, forbidden science, and alien tech is getting spilled into the player character's hands. The goods are valuable because they're rare to players, rather than being impossible to reproduce (yet).

That said, it's pretty rare for it to be purely consumer goods. Finding an abandoned freighter with a bunch of sound equipment (or, more often, drugs) is a win and a possibility, but it's tied to a rare and poorly documented gameplay loop.

No Man's Sky at least looks like it, but there's some spoiler-reasons that it doesn't actual real. And the alien outposts are weird enough and often-populated enough that they map poorly onto storage facilities.

Minecraft mods play with it a lot. DeceasedCraft's probably the most accessible version, where machines and equipment that would normally be the entry level into various tech mods are very hard to craft, and thus scavenging them from various buildings is a vital progression mechanism, with warehouses and storage facilities being an early-game target. Don't know of any modpacks where they're long-abandoned, though; DeceasedCraft is implied to be days or at most months after a zombie apocalypse.

For the real world, it's a funny story, but it gets complicated by the nature of those goods. Very few consumer electronics can survive a long period of anything less than ideal storage, and the buildings themselves are famously prone to various failure states. Same for anything made of paper or unfinished wood. Raw materials like plastic, titanium, aluminum, and high-grade steel may well last and be impractical to produce in a post-apocalyptic setting, but a lot of them wouldn't be plausible to manufacture into anything particularly useful.

"Tech-mining" is pretty much the setting for the entire gaming genre of "extraction shooters".

I’ve always been a bit confused about that. What’s in Tarkov that’s worth facing down a couple dozen psychopaths, some of whom are highly trained and/or awfully resistant to bullets? I’m not even sure what you’re collecting in Arc Raiders or Marathon.

Out of the extraction non-shooters…Quasimorph acts like almost everything you loot was available, just to someone else. It’s more piracy than mining. Maybe the quasistuff counts.

At least Duckov has a sensible goal.

Not quite post-apoc, but there's Snow Crash, where the Protagonist spends most of his Metaverse time connected from the 20x30 storage unit where he and his roommate live.

I wonder how well most storage units would hold up, post-apocalypse. The climate controlled ones would lose that control when the grid goes down, and anybody paying a premium for climate control probably has something they expect to decay at ambient temperatures+humidity, but nobody's going to get a second unit for more robust possessions so even the climate controlled units would still be worth cracking open to see what survived.

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